Pelican Blood

Maybe there's too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll in this book for some people, but it's great description of birding for people. Good characters ,good scenes, good writing. Two thumbs-up!

We live in an age obsessed with obsession, and birding has been fodder for many books about that topic lately. Most of them, unfortunately, have been written by non-birders or new birders, who really lack the background and the sympathy to investigate the fascination birders feel for their hobby. Pelican Blood is different, and much better. The birding context is beautifully drawn and authentic, though North American birders will find some of it foreign--the 'Brits' really are different from you and me, and much hard-core birding there takes place at a different social level from the Tilley-hats-and-Swarovskis crowd that has lately come to monopolize the sport here. As a novel, I found the book well constructed and compelling. It owes obvious debts to Camus and Dostoyevski (the first-person narrator, a murderer, goes birding the day his mother dies; and who is Stevie if not Sonya of the "yellow ticket"?), but comes to be a quite touching depiction of the importance of friendship and the impossibility of love, what some might dismiss as the 'usual' gen-x (or are we up to y, or z?) theme, but here delineated economically and well. I'm passing this book around to all my friends. 'Nuff said.